The roots of the research on deserted medieval villages in Austria are local and regional interests in deserted villages from the 1830s onwards. Primarily, this early research was based on written sources and oral traditions of local populations.

The origin of the Deserted Villages Archive of the Austrian Society for Medieval and Modern Archaeology (ÖGMN) is linked to the development of medieval archaeology and its institutionalization at universities in German-speaking countries.

In the 1950s Fritz Felgenhauer (1920–2009), a prehistorian at the University of Vienna, turned his attention to medieval archaeology and founded the Archive for Medieval Archaeology (AMA) with the Deserted Villages Archive in 1970/71. In his research on abandoned medieval villages, back then Felgenhauer pursued with the concept of archaeological-historical spatial recording the pioneering concept of settlement archaeology, which corresponds with actual approaches of landscape archaeology. His research group built up archive stocks, initiated the exchange of ideas between archaeologists and knew how to incorporate the knowledge and commitment of interested laypeople to locate abandoned settlement sites.

From 1986 to the 2000s, Kurt Bors curated the Deserted Villages Archive. Due to his knowledge as a geographer, he paid attention to characteristics of deserted settlements, such as the location to water, morphological conditions, vegetation, but also road networks, and gaps in the settlement network and developed his methodology of geographical-archaeological field research.

Due to Fritz Felgenhauer's connection with the ÖGMN, which he founded, the stocks of the AMA and the Deserted Villages Archive became property of the society.

In June 2022, initial discussions took place to digitize the Deserted Village Archive and make it freely accessible to researchers and lays. The open-source database software OpenAtlas was identified as a suitable tool. The financial resources for the DeVill – Deserted Villages Archive-project were raised through the "Kulturerbe digital" funding program.

The Deserted Villages Archive contains various data categories such as descriptions of individual deserted villages including literature citations, photocopies of local literature, cartographic representations, photographs, correspondence and archaeological surface finds. These data categories required different digitization processes and their structuring in order to preserve a maximum of information of the cultural heritage objects.

The digitization of the archive stocks was carried out according to the FAIR principles. Flatware (written and image documents) was scanned, text documents were being subjected to an OCR process to create searchable PDF files. Archaeological surface finds were documented using the Laser Aided Profiler.

DeVill's data structure is largely based on the THANADOS data model which has been further developed. GIS elements and the data structure place, source, event, actor, artefact, reference, and type were adopted. In order to be able to integrate the large number and variety of data, OpenAtlas respectively DeVill use CIDOC CRM, whereby the DeVill data model is based on four hierarchical levels, namely place, feature, stratigraphic unit, and artefact. DeVill-specific classifications were expanded, particularly regarding the categories relevant to deserted settlement research (settlement types, etc.) but also to archaeological medieval finds (object types, pottery qualities, etc.).

For metadata capture and regarding Linked Open Data and FAIR principles, existing controlled vocabularies were linked wherever possible, such as the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Wikidata, Periodo and Geonames. Where this was not possible, references were made to print literature.

Spatial site data were georeferenced and compared with historical maps, using existing digital resources and linking them where possible. The majority of the geographical data comes from several hundred sketches based on cadastral maps. For abandoned villages for which such sketches were available, digital three-dimensional terrain models of the site surroundings were created, giving users an idea of the landscape and topographical situation of the abandoned villages.

In the future, data will be updated with new information as well as newly discovered or localized deserted settlements.